Academic Skills

What do your students think annotation looks like? For many, it probably begins and ends with the image of an assigned novel bristling with yellow Post-its.

But to annotate simply means to add a note to a text — whether marginalia in a book, or a comment on Facebook or YouTube. Even if they don’t realize they’re doing it, young people are annotating constantly as a natural way of engaging with the world.

In this post we hope to both expand their definition of what annotation can be and inspire them to experiment with new ways of doing it — in class and out.

What Does It Mean to Annotate? Expanding the Definition

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Mark Twain left a comment about “Huckleberry Finn” in his copy of “The Pen and the Book” by Walter Besant. Related ArticleCredit Sally Ryan for The New York Times

An annotation is a note added to a book, drawing or any other kind of text as a comment or explanation. It is an age-old learning practice, older than books themselves, one used by medieval scribes in the very process of transcription.

For many, it is a natural extension of reading. As Sam Anderson puts it in a 2011 essay for The Times Magazine, his college habit of making notes in the margins of books “quickly began to feel, for me, like something more intense: a way to not just passively read but to fully enter a text, to collaborate with it, to mingle with an author on some kind of primary textual plane.”

For teachers, it can be a technique to slow readers down, deepen their engagement and aid in comprehension and analysis, skills few need to be convinced matter in the era of the Common Core. For students, though, that exercise can sometimes feel artificial.

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“Not even one word of truth,” Queen Victoria wrote in the margins of a copy of Agnes Strickland’s 1840 biography, “Queen Victoria From Her Birth to Her Bridal.” Related Article Credit

Yet annotation is something we all do all the time and can include everything from footnotes to criticism, graffiti to fan fiction. What is social media but spaces where people annotate texts and images, the digital margins of our daily lives?

Sam Anderson writes:

We are living increasingly in a culture of response. Twitter is basically electronic marginalia on everything in the world: jokes, sports, revolutions. The best parallel in critical writing might be online episode recaps of TV shows: a viewer rolling around in a work of art, noticing it deeply, not just (as critics too often do) resorting to distant acts of intellection. Marginalia is literature’s TV recap, although even more satisfying: real-time commentary happening in the core of the thing being commented upon.

On NYTimes.com and on The Learning Network, thousands of comments, or annotations, are posted by readers daily on issues from free speech on college campuses to drone racing. All comments are moderated, and the system allows both readers and Times journalists to reply to and “recommend” them.

Annotation in academic settings is typically considered a means to an end, a basis for class discussion or points made in a final paper. But annotation can also be a kind of end in itself, or at least more than a rest stop on the way to intellectual discovery. This becomes especially true when annotation is brought into the public and collaborative space of social reading online, and students can see their classmates’ comments alongside their own.

And with recent innovations in web annotation like the ability to add multimedia marginalia like that in the image at the top of this post (done by Jeremy Dean’s students at St. Stephen’s Episcopal School in Austin, Tex.), the process of annotation can feel more fun and engaging than dutiful.

Several years ago, the website Genius (formerly Rap Genius) was established to annotate music lyrics hosted on its platform. It’s proven to be something young people happily do on their own, discussing the word choices and poetic devices used by their favorite musicians in the same way their teachers ask them to discuss great works of literature in class.

Genius is now adding a growing list of nonmusical texts to its website — including many classic literary texts like the Langston Hughes poem at the top of this post — and has also developed a plugin for users to use in annotating other websites.

Ask your students how many kinds of annotation they can find — around the Web and out in the world. Then create a kind of “annotation gallery” of possibilities to inspire their own work.

For instance, here are just a few from The Times:

— The series Anatomy of a Scene invites film directors to comment on their own work. Here, Ava DuVernay narrates a sequence from “Selma”:

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Anatomy of a Scene | ‘Selma’

Ava DuVernay narrates a sequence from “Selma,” featuring David Oyelowo and Carmen Ejogo.

— On the Learning Network, our most popular form of annotation is our weekly What’s Going On in This Picture? discussion, in which hundreds of students discuss what they see in a captionless photo. A moderator from Visual Thinking Strategies engages with them live, and the “backstory” about the photo is posted several days later.

Digital annotation is close reading 2.0. Through the visualization of the process of highlighting and noting words, phrases and sentences, students are forced to keep their thinking and writing “close” to the text and its evidence. And, when done with others, students can create what feels like a social network for close reading — a way of working many find much more engaging than individual analog annotation.

There are a variety of tools out there that allow you to annotate digital texts collaboratively. Most of us have probably done this in Word or Google Docs. There are far fewer tools that allow you to annotate the actual web, where annotations are linked to specific text at specific web addresses like “learning.blogs.nytimes.com/”.

Genius’s Web Annotator is one of them. By installing Genius’s browser extension, you and your students can annotate any page on the Internet, though all annotations must be public.

Diigo is another tool for annotating the web, but with a decidedly more educational focus, including the ability to annotate in private groups. Diigo has number of other tools in addition to annotation that might be attractive to students and teachers, such as an outlining tool. While student and teacher accounts at Diigo are free, their features are limited and the service is ultimately based on a subscription model.

A third option is the free web annotation tool developed by the nonprofit Hypothesis. It shares much of the same functionality as Genius and Diigo — it’s predominantly a browser extension, and it too offers private groups — but unlike the other two, it is both open source and, like the web itself, based on open standards. It also has an education department focused on supporting teachers and students using the service.

This is the broadest and probably most familiar form of annotation for students — the kind of conversation with a text that readers have been having as long as books have existed.

It’s the marginalia Sam Anderson writes about in his essay and exhibits in “A View From the Margins,” his series of audio recordings on 12 months of reading, and annotating, everything from “1Q84″ by Haruki Murakami to “Bleak House” by Charles Dickens (the latter of which, he says, inspired “my most explosive LOL in my entire year of reading”).

The Learning Network has an entire lesson plan devoted to doing it the old-fashioned, analog way — but if you’d like to experiment with doing it digitally, you might look at what Sarah Gross, a high school teacher and contributor to our blog, did recently using Hypothesis with her senior class as they read the Opinion piece “What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech.”

Click on the highlighted words and sentences to see how she and her students posed questions and responded to them, added personal reactions, made connections and replied to one another. You can see that it feels very much like sitting in on a class discussion. This is one of the primary benefits of collaborative annotation in the classroom: Students engage texts and one another before meeting face to face, making that meeting all the more energetic and productive.

In both examples, you’ll see that an annotation need not be, and often is not, an answer. A simple question mark can flag a word or passage for discussion, for instance. Directing students to annotate in this way creates a sort of heat map for the instructor that can be used to zero in on troubling sections and subjects or initiate class discussion. And while the teacher can respond to such student annotations, a possible follow-up exercise could involve students responding to one another instead.

Here are some things students can do as they annotate — many of which we take on in greater depth in the other exercises below:

Circle unfamiliar words or references.

Mark passages with symbols like question or exclamation marks.

Highlight important lines or sections.

Connect parts of the text to other parts with arrows.

Note emotional reactions.

Post questions.

Make connections to other texts or to their own lives.

Summarize difficult concepts.

Add related images.

Add links to related information.

Note how the piece is structured, or how the author uses language in interesting ways.

React to the content over all.

Note patterns, themes and motifs.

Annotating Current Events to Add Context and Enrich Background Knowledge

Though The Times and other news sources are increasingly publishing “explainers” that offer a bigger picture (like this one, on the Islamic State), showing students how to do this kind of glossing for themselves and one another teaches them a skill they can use for the rest of their lives. There is something very powerful about seeing students begin to imagine themselves as scholars, responsible for guiding a real audience through a text, whether their own peers or a broader intellectual community.

A 2012 Learning Network lesson plan, Easy Access: Creating Annotated Versions of News Articles, details ideas for having students try this, whether alone or in collaboration with others — although collaboratively is perhaps the better choice since they can share the burden of research.

Throughout, students can also be encouraged to practice skills like rephrasing research material appropriately and citing sources using different formatting styles.

For an example before they try it themselves, students might look at The Times’s annotation of Pope Francis’ September address to Congress, in which reporters with expertise in different areas explain the context of many of the pope’s statements.

When they’re ready, here are some of the kinds of annotations they might add:

Definitions for terms.

Dates for events or documents.

Maps or geographic references for events or locations.

Historical and other background information for events mentioned.

Statistics or demographics relevant to locations or groups.

Biographical information for key players.

Brief histories of groups or organizations mentioned.

Explainers and informative graphics.

Video clips, slide shows, photographs, charts and graphs.

Related news articles and footage.

Annotating With Multimedia

One of the most powerful aspects of writing online is the ability to include images and other multimedia elements in one’s compositions. The screenshot at the very top of this post shows a powerful example from Genius.com of students composing analysis using both image and texts.

Ask students to read an article and add images — photos, maps, illustrations, GIFs, graphics, videos — to help bring the story to life. This is also an opportunity to teach students about rules governing use of images, and editorial tasks like captioning and attribution.

These images can simply be representative (a reference to Lincoln annotated with a photo of the 16th president, for example), but more advanced students might also think about how images themselves make arguments and serve other rhetorical purposes.

Students can also use their imaginations to annotate texts with their own drawings, photographs or videos in line with the relevant sources of textual inspiration. Whether completed individually or collaboratively, this exercise can result in some wonderful illustrated editions of course texts. For inspiration, have a look at Nathan Blom’s Annotated Literature Projects at LaGuardia High School for the Arts.

Annotation as Argument

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Trump Reads The Times at a Rally

Donald Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, reacted to an article about himself in The New York Times on Thursday at a campaign rally in Greenville, S.C.

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS on Publish Date August 27, 2015.
Photo by Travis Dove for The New York Times.

Students are already very familiar with this kind of annotation, even if they don’t realize it. They see it every day as they click around the web. It’s what Donald Trump is doing in the video above, and it’s what they do when they post a review of something on Yelp or Rotten Tomatoes, comment on an opinion someone expresses on Facebook or tweet a reaction to a news or sports event or TV show.

One place students can go to see a great deal of thoughtful argument: reader comments on Times articles. Often, in fact, the comments are as interesting as the article itself.

Have them choose a topic that interests them or about which they have strong opinions, then scroll through what other commenters have appended. For instance, here one reader pushes back on ideas in a piece by the comedian and actor Aziz Ansari about acting, race and Hollywood:

Next, you might invite students to move to more formal analysis of rhetorical strategies and fallacies by having them read and annotate Times Op-Ed pieces. Framing their opinions as annotations of specific statements or facts can remind them that our arguments should be grounded in actual evidence. And allowing students to express their opinions in the margins of the web, and helping them become responsible and thoughtful as they do it, is a huge part of what it means to be literate both on online and in democratic society generally.

Students could be asked simply to respond to the reading with their thoughts, as in a dialectical reading journal, or to employ specific cultural or persuasive strategies in their rhetorical intervention. For instance, they might annotate to identify the use of logos, ethos and pathos.

Annotation can also serve as a kind of “rehearsal space” for formal writing. As your students practice “talking back” to Opinion pieces in The Times, they might consider it preparation for their own argumentative essays, perhaps to submit to our annual contest, which we’ll feature again in Feb., 2016.

As with all the ideas in this post, this can be done independently or collaboratively. Done independently, students can compare their articles and discuss how different authors establish their authority or commit common fallacies. Focused on a suite of articles relating to a specific topic, students might be asked to note patterns of expression.

Another idea: Ask students to fact-check a claim made in an article. This can be especially powerful in the case of political speeches or Op-Ed pieces. Annotations should be based on related research and should evaluate the truthfulness of the original claim using predetermined criteria. Here is an example of how professional political reporters have done this at PolitiFact using the Genius annotation tool. Climatologists have also done this using Hypothesis to comment on popular news coverage of climate change.

In her essay “Reading Antarctica,” Kamila Shamsie writes about reading “Moby Dick” while on a boat to Antarctica — and finding herself annotating as she went:

I never annotate novels; it seems odd to think anything I might write in the margins could add to rather than detract from what is printed on the page. But from the start, the echoes between what I was reading and what I was seeing around me seemed to ask for me to take note, quite literally.

While your students might not have at hand as dramatic a parallel between their own experience and a text, annotating explicitly to make connections between what they’re reading and the rest of the world can help them see why particular texts matter and are still relevant today.

This exercise offers a slightly different take on what it means to annotate. Instead of having students note specific words and passages, they are, instead, simply tagging a series of texts on a particular topic in order to collect, categorize and organize them.

Direct students to find articles relating to a topic they will be researching. Some web annotation tools like Hypothesis include a tagging or bookmarking feature that can be used to organize research. For instance, a class at Washington State University Vancouver is currently collaboratively researching the topic of education policy and has tagged its work ‘EduPol’.

To create a digital version of a traditional annotated bibliography from here, page-level annotations can be used to summarize the sources, and in-line annotation can further break down and begin analyzing arguments. Using tagging and annotation in this way, teachers can follow along and engage students in their research processes.

Annotating History

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The Titanic departing Britain for New York on April 10, 1912.Credit Associated Press

Invite students to annotate archival news reports about a major historical event you are studying. You might use our On This Day feature to find interesting front-page news, from the moon landing to the sinking of the Titanic, or use Times Machine to page through copies of The Times from 1851 to 1980 as they originally appeared.

After students have practiced digital annotation of various kinds alone and in groups and become comfortable with the way a particular platform like Hypothesis works, set them free to annotate whatever they like.

For instance, you can assign them to roam through The New York Times, or any other newspaper, as part of an inquiry project, adding comments on the things that interest them. And you can follow their work as they go. If you are using Hypothesis, each user’s annotations are streamed on their public “My Annotations” page, and teachers can monitor student work like a portfolio rather than on individual texts if so desired. (You can click on a user name attached to an annotation or search the Hypothesis stream for a user name to locate this page. Here, for instance, is Jeremy Dean’s, and you can see he’s been annotating everything from a Times article on the new Quentin Tarantino movie to a recent Supreme Court decision.)

Many of the exercises above presume that students are annotating together on a shared course text. But the nature of web annotation is that we can see the notes of others even if we are not reading the same text. In this way, we can attend to annotations as texts themselves. Like scrolling through a friend’s Facebook page or Twitter feed, seeing someone else navigate the world through annotation can be compelling and edifying.

How do your students annotate? What experiments have you tried? Annotate this piece yourself by posting a comment.

Jeremy Dean has taught English at both the college and high school levels. He started the education initiative at Genius and is the current director of education at Hypothesis.

Language

3Apply knowledge of language to understand how language functions in different contexts, to make effective choices for meaning or style, and to comprehend more fully when reading or listening.

4Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases by using context clues, analyzing meaningful word parts, and consulting general and specialized reference materials, as appropriate.

6Acquire and use accurately a range of general academic and domain-specific words and phrases sufficient for reading, writing, speaking, and listening at the college and career readiness level; demonstrate independence in gathering vocabulary knowledge when encountering an unknown term important to comprehension or expression.